Not a Dev Blog 1 - Hey Guys What's Going On

Hey, all. It’s Bites. And it’s just going to be me this time - this is no dev blog, but rather a short introspective on game development and my experience with it over the last couple years. I hope it can give a little perspective to those of you interested in pursuing gamedev yourself.

Being in the public eye sucks.

Not for a minute do I regret starting this project, and there are a bunch of reasons for that. It’s been a terrific growth experience, it’s introduced me to some of the coolest and most skilled people I know, and it’s allowed me to make a game that I will enjoy playing very, very much.

But wow, it’s can be stressful dealing with literally thousands of people who are all so, so very eager about something you’re making.

I’ve looked at probably dozens or even over a hundred talks, videos, and blog posts about game dev. People with tips about how to start, important details about game design. But none of them spoke on what it’s like when you hit that lucky break, and your project gets bigger than you expected. In chat rooms, I still find myself being cruel or rude to strangers who are really just very excited about Rolled Out!, on account of… that’s how I’ve always interacted with random strangers. I’m trying to get better at it, of course. The Discord server for the game is one way I’ve attempted to facilitate that.

The other thing that really does my head in, is just how much crap one has to juggle at a time for such a big project.

Did you know that one of the most common tips given to new and aspiring gamedevs is to ‘Start Small’? Make a tetris clone, or a simple 2D platformer. Something manageable, that a single person can finish within a month. I kind of farted all over that advice. Granted, I made some little things in Garry’s Mod before I started Rolled Out!, but it’s still a pretty dang big jump to make.

With Rolled Out!, I’m always jumping between level design, backgrounds, blueprint scripting, character modeling and animation, texture work, answering emails, writing these blog posts, and interacting with the rest of the dev team to figure out what is being done/needs doing. It’s a similar boat for some of the other devs, too. Many of them also have their jobs, school, and personal projects to balance out with development on this game.

tl;dr game dev is hard in a lot of weird ways I didn’t expect, as well as a bunch of ways that make perfect sense.

I was planning to talk a bit about some of the gamedev projects I took part in before Rolled Out!, but I’m sleepy, so I’ll talk about it in another post. In that case, I’ll just leave you with a video of one of the things I made.

See you all on the 15th with a Rolled Out! dev blog!